Ivy continued her abandoned packing, and Lila continued to sit on the bed and watch. After a while, Lila got up and went over to the dressing table and got an emery board and returned to the bed. She began shaping her fingernails carefully with the emery board, now paying absolutely no attention to Ivy, who had closed the large bag and was filling a smaller one with toilet articles and other small possessions. Lila did not look up from her meticulous work until Ivy had finished at last and was standing erect beside the large bag, the smaller one in her hand, strangely irresolute in the end, as if, now that the time had come to go, she could not quite believe in her ability to take such definitive action.
“Do you have everything?” Lila said.
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“Please be absolutely sure to take everything. I want nothing left to remind me that you were ever here, or that I ever knew you.”
“Do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t hate you at all. I despise you, which is something quite different. I despise your whining and your eternal, sickly depression. You may call your moods and attitudes by whatever euphemisms you may choose, but the fact is that you are simply a coward, and that’s your whole trouble. I can’t understand how I’ve tolerated you so long. It’s much better that you are leaving, since you insist, for sooner or later I might have felt compelled to send you away anyhow.”
“I’m not such a coward as you think. You’ll see.”
“Oh, you’ll come crawling back when you reach the miserable end of whatever stupid arrangement you’ve got yourself involved in. I suppose, since I have some responsibility for you, that I’ll take you in again.”
“I won’t come back.”
Lila stood up slowly. She made no threatening gesture, no overt sign at all of violence, and her voice, when she spoke, was rigidly restrained. But the quality of her fury was all the more deadly for its restraint.
“For God’s sake, then, will you kindly quit talking about it and go? Go at once. I want you to get out of my apartment and out of my sight and out of my mind. Before you go, however, I want you to understand one thing clearly. If you do anything or say anything to harm me, I’ll find a way to make you regret it.”
“I have no wish to harm you,” Ivy said. “I’ve told you so before, and it’s true.”
The room was menacing, a place of danger in which all objects were in a conspiracy against her. Bending at the knees, holding her body rigid in precarious balance, she picked up the large bag and walked carefully out of the bedroom and through the living room to the door. She set the large bag down, opened the door, picked the bag up again, went through into the hall, once more set the bag down while she closed the door firmly behind her. She did all this with an air of conscious calculation, as if it were terribly complex and difficult, and afterward, standing safely in the hall at last, she had a sense of exhilaration that she had actually done under the most difficult circumstances, after being subjected to the most seductive influence, what she had come to do.
Carrying the bags, she walked downstairs, preferring not to use the elevator. There was no taxi in sight on the street outside, and so she began to walk and had walked several blocks before a taxi came along and stopped at her signal. This also seemed to her a major and significant accomplishment, stopping the taxi so easily, and she got into it and gave the address on Market Street with a feeling of authority that was quite satisfying. She had one bad moment when she saw that the meter registered an amount larger than the balance of what Henry had left for her, but then she remembered her own money in the small bag, and she got safely to where she was going and paid the fare fully and everything was all right, or nearly so.
Chapter 5
In the following days of their chaste cohabitation, Henry became accustomed to having Ivy around the place and would have missed her if she had gone away. Most surprisingly of all, he discovered that he worked better when she was there, somehow supported and sustained in his efforts by the slight sounds of her movement, her breathing, the occasional remarks she made aloud to herself without any expectation of a response from him. When he came back in the evenings from his small job with a minor publisher of three obscure trade journals, he came with a sense of expectancy that was never quite sure of fulfillment, and he always discovered her presence with mixed feelings of relief and astonishment that she had not, while he was gone, packed her things and departed without a sign or word.
Now, on a night in December, he looked up and around from his work at the table and saw her lying on her belly on the sofa with a thick book propped against the sofa’s arm in front of her eyes. It was a childish and appealing position, her knees bent and her heels waving back and forth above her narrow stern. He got up suddenly and walked across the room to one of the windows overlooking the street. Christmas was coming on, and the street lamps spaced along the curb were decorated with large red-and-white striped candy canes. The windows of the shops across the street had been dressed for the season with monotonous similarity in bright tinsel and piper above cotton and glitter in the semblance of snow. It had snowed in reality for a day and a night, but the snow was now slush on the sidewalk and street. On the nearest corner, seen at a sharp angle from the window where Henry stood, a large black pot of the Salvation Army hung from a tripod to receive alms for the poor. A soldier of the Army stood beside the pot and rang his bell in largo tempo, calculated to survive the long hours of supplication. The sound of the bell did not reach Henry, but he imagined, each time the soldier’s arm rose and fell, that he could hear the clapper strike.
“We ought to have a tree,” Henry said.
“A Christmas tree?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“They’re very expensive. Do you think you can afford it?”
“Certainly I can afford it. I’m not so poor that I can’t buy a tree if I please.”
“Well, it would be nice to have a tree, but I don’t think you ought to buy one.”
“Nonsense. Go out and buy one tomorrow. You’ll have to get some lights and ornaments for it too.”
She closed her book, which was the third one of several that she had decided to read in a program of self-improvement in several areas. Rolling over and sitting up on the sofa, she glared at his back with a kind of sulky resentment.
“I was going to buy one Saturday as a surprise,” she said, “but I see that you’re bound to spoil it.”
“Why wait until Saturday?”
“Because I’m being paid Saturday, that’s why. I was going to buy the tree as a surprise with my own money.”
“What the devil do you mean? Are you actually working somewhere?”
“That follows, doesn’t it? If I’m being paid, I must be working. Sometimes I think you like to be purposely obtuse.”
“Never mind abusing me. I’m not in the mood for it. Where are you working, if you don’t mind saying?”
“I’m working downstairs in the bookshop.”
“For old Adolph Brennan?”
“Yes. I went down to talk with him and to explain our arrangement, that I’m staying with you for a while, because I thought he had a right to know, being the landlord and all, and after talking with him and explaining the arrangement, I asked him if he needed any help during the Christmas rush, and he said it happened that he did, though I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular rush. I guess there aren’t many people who give secondhand books as Christmas presents. Anyhow, what I intended, really, was to work for nothing in return for being allowed to stay here, but he insisted on paying me a little besides. He’s a very sweet old man.”